Roe isn’t just about women’s reproductive rights ...

Nancy Northup
of the Center for
Reproductive Rights

Nancy Northup's op-ed in today's Washington Post gives a good reason why even an abortion opponent ought to withhold support from President Trump's nominee to replace Antonin on the Supreme Court. (Trump is expected to announce the identity of his nominee later today from among four possibilities, all of whom are known to be anti-choice.) Northup, president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, makes a convincing case that "everyone’s personal-liberty rights are on the line" with this nomination.

The reason is that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision (as upheld in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey) that held that the government cannot constitutionally interfere with individuals' personal-liberty rights is part of a long line of decisions which do not necessarily affect women's reproductive rights. Northup writes:

Just as Roe rested on past liberty decisions, it became the basis for future ones — including outside the area of women’s reproductive rights. The court cited Roe and Casey’s reasoning in a broad range of subsequent cases. Those include landmark decisions protecting liberty rights, as in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which held that the government cannot criminalize intimate sexual conduct between same-sex partners, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), guaranteeing same-sex couples the right to marry.

This line of precedent protects us all, and a post-Kennedy Supreme Court could not sever it without threatening to destroy our “realm of personal liberty.”

... In deciding Roe, the court looked to cases in the 1920s on the right of parents to educate their children according to their values and ideas, and the justices drew a line to landmark decisions affirming the right to use contraception and, in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, the right to marry someone of a different race.

I agree with Northup, even though I am personally not all that happy with Roe-legalized abortion. I think reversing Roe and Casey would undermine too much settled personal-liberty law well outside the sphere of reproductive rights.